The solution to climate change that has nothing to do with cars or coal

Amazon rainforest at
dawn on Dec. 29, 2015. (Photo by Harvey Locke)

AMAZONAS,
Brazil – At the base of a towering, 150-foot-high angelim tree, the scattered sloth
claws and clumps of fur are a dead giveaway.

The tree
contains the nest of a harpy eagle, a bird so powerful it kills monkeys and
sloths by tearing them from the trees with its enormous claws. Its
presence is a good sign to the scientists who are studying the surrounding
forest.

It means
this section of trees and its vast network of life are still healthy enough to
support such a high-order predator. And that, in turn, is at least a small
bit of good news for the Earth’s climate.

Of all the
components of the recent Paris accord on climate change, the one that
probably got the least attention but could have the most immediate
potential involves the world’s forests. In a section some hailed as
historic, the document endorsed a United Nations mechanism for wealthier
nations to pay developing countries like Brazil for
reducing deforestation.

How
Thomas Lovejoy's new research could link deforestation to climate change

Play Video1:48

Conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy is in Brazil on a
research project that studies the effects of Amazon deforestation. His results
have shown less tree growth and animal life in the fragmented forests left
behind, which may impact the Amazon rainforest and global climate. (Jhaan
Elker/The Washington Post)

Trees are
good at keeping carbon out of the air, and simply preserving the planet’s
vast forests is a straightforward way to get a huge head start on the
business of slowing climate change. But that effort grows tougher every
day. After years of progress, deforestation rates have increased recently
in Brazil, and deforestation continues apace across much of the global
tropics. The economic forces of agriculture and trade remain too strong to
resist.

Calls for
saving rainforests have a long history, but including forests as a core part
of the global climate solution is “very very recent,” said Naoko Ishii,
CEO of the Global Environment Facility, an international body that invests
in restoring tropical forests. “Without taking care of the forests, it’s
going to be just impossible to achieve the Paris agreement.”

In fact,
recent estimates suggest as much as a third of climate emissions could
be offset by stopping deforestation and restoring forest land — and that
this solution could be achieved much faster than cuts to fossil fuels.

Forests are
a crucial “carbon sink,” living engines for absorbing and storing
carbon. Tropical forests store the most carbon of all, and no tropical
forest on Earth is bigger than the Amazon. It accounts for about half of
all the carbon these forests store. But the Brazilian Amazon has lost
nearly a fifth of its forest cover already — and the forest left behind
also suffers because it is more fragmented and less continuous.

Thomas
Lovejoy, a George Mason University ecologist, has been studying this section
of Amazon for decades. While he was encouraged to see the harpy eagle at
its nest on a recent afternoon, he was conscious of the forest’s overall
fragility.

The Amazon
system as a whole, Lovejoy said, is at a “precarious point. And you
know, the obvious thing is, you don’t want to find out where the tipping
point is by tipping it.”

A maturing
Subadult Harpy Eagle seen in the Amazon rain forest on Dec. 30, 2015. (Photo by
Harvey Locke)

Of
trees and warming

The forest is protected in this roughly 4-square-mile federal research and
conservation plot to
the northeast of the city of Manaus, where the dark and acidic Rio Negro meets
the more brownish Solimões to form the lower Amazon river, the largest in
the world.

But not far
from here, the smell of smoke still hangs over a recently deforested plot –
trees slashed down and then burned. So it has gone throughout the Amazon,
and far worse in more southern Brazilian states, such as Pará and Mato
Grosso.

All of which
makes the relentless focus on fossil fuels in the climate discussion –
and the consigning of forests, at least until now, to a relative side role
– somewhat puzzling. Forests, after all, are almost half carbon (if you
leave out the water, that is). The billion year old process of
photosynthesis stores carbon in the sugars that, in turn, fuel plant growth
and metabolism.

The storage
of carbon is most intense in tropical forests, where a gigantic
abundance of different types of trees, thick vines and epiphytes (plants
that grow on other plants) are all fighting one another for a slice of
direct tropical sunlight – only a sliver of which actually reaches the
forest floor. Trees don’t put down very deep roots here; they stretch them
outward across the ground, over a layer of often sandy soil that isn’t even
very rich or fertile. If the land is cleared, not only is all the carbon
lost to the atmosphere, but the result often isn’t even very good farmland
or pasture.

Net
greenhouse gas emissions due to tropical deforestation and forest degradation
are about 8 to 15 percent of the global total, which doesn’t sound like
that much. But a recent study in Nature Climate Change found that stopping
deforestation could nonetheless be a huge piece of the climate solution.
That’s because if tropical deforestation stopped, not only would those
emissions go away, but on top of that, forests would start stowing away
a significant part of the carbon from our fossil fuel emissions.

“One could
reduce total CO2 emissions by about 30 percent, just working in the
land sector,” said Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research
Center. “And that’s a lot.”

Moreover,
stopping deforestation could buy precious time to ratchet down fossil
fuel emissions. “It’s very hard to suddenly convert everyone to electric
cars, and power generation is gradually changing, but it’s going to take
decades,” said Paul Salaman, CEO of the Rainforest Trust. “But tropical
deforestation can literally be stopped point blank with commitment of countries.”

Tom Lovejoy seen
at a forest fragment of Amazon rainforest on Dec. 31, 2015. (Photo by
Harvey Locke)

Why
a fragmented forest stores less carbon

What science is revealing, meanwhile, is that it’s not just deforestation itself
that’s the problem
– it’s also the damage to what’s left behind.

Camp 41,
which is run collaboratively by Brazil’s National Institute for
Amazonian Research and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, is a
scientific “control” – an example of what happens when you just leave the
rainforest alone and let it grow. By contrast, near here are several
forest fragments, which Lovejoy helped preserve for research in the late 1970s
after the surrounding land was set to be cleared for ranching.

The study of
these fragments, which has been ongoing since 1980, shows that the
forest left behind in the wake of deforestation also suffers greatly.

“This
project I think more than any other demonstrated that forest fragmentation
in patches was a very, very big problem for nature,” said Harvey Locke, a
conservationist and writer who visited Camp 41 with Lovejoy in December.
“You never hear anybody seriously arguing now that several little patches
are better than a big intact block.”

Walking
through an isolated, nearly 25-acre forest fragment presents a stunning
contrast with the forest near the harpy eagle’s angelim tree. In the
intact forest, it’s dark and even relatively cool at the forest floor, a
simple function of the fact that trees and vines, crowding upward, have
managed to claim nearly all of the sunlight.

But in the
fragment, direct tropical sunlight penetrates much farther, not only from
above but from every side. It’s warmer as a result, and also drier – the
layer of fallen leaves on the forest floor isn’t wet and spongy, but
crunches and crackles as you walk.

This
environment sustains less life – animals and plants alike. Spider monkeys,
which need to range over a huge area, can’t survive in a fragment like
this, Lovejoy said. And they’re one food source for the harpy eagle.

“Wherever
the forest has been altered or compromised, where hunting has reduced
prey items, harpys are one of the first to suffer,” said Bret Whitney, a
specialist in Brazilian birds and a research associate at Louisiana State
University who guided the recent trip to Camp 41 and identified the harpy
eagle. “They really require an intact ecosystem to be out there.”

“We know
that tree mortality went up in this fragment compared to continuous
forest,” Lovejoy said. The forest, when fragmented, “becomes simpler,” he
said. Winds also blow down more trees in fragments, Lovejoy’s research
suggests, another reason that they store less carbon.

The
punchline, then, isn’t far from that of the movie Avatar: it’s all connected.
The climate, the trees, the animals living in the forest, and the carbon
the forest stores. Indeed, recent research suggests that the poaching and
killing of large forest animals like tapirs – another problem in the
Amazon and around the world – also reduces the forest’s carbon stock
because these animals disperse the large seeds that in turn grow into the
largest trees.

Without
them, you’d have fewer angelims, and fewer of the other major canopy trees
that dominate the tropical skyline, and that stand out if you get high
enough to actually see them.

And these
problems certainly aren’t confined to the Amazon. “Seventy percent of
the world’s remaining forests are within 1 kilometer of a road,” Lovejoy
said. “Which is a measure of how advanced fragmentation is.”

Brazil’s
deforestation success story turns mixed

It’s not that Brazil is indifferent to the problem of deforestation – it has recently
been celebrated for making considerable progress on the problem. Between
1995 and 2005, it was losing over 7,500 square miles of forest per year on
average. (That’s more than one Connecticut per year). However, in 2013 it
only lost about 2,255 square miles, a 70 percent reduction credited to
greater enforcement of forest protections.

Lately,
though, the celebrations have died off a bit – deforestation in Brazil
appears to have ticked up again somewhat in recent years, albeit for
unclear reasons. Usually, it decreases with greater law enforcement and
increases in stronger economies. But right now, with the Brazilian economy
in the tank – the currency, the real, has plunged from being worth about
half of a U.S. dollar in 2012-2013 to being worth only a quarter of one today
– it’s bucking both of these trends.

“Recently,
you have high levels of enforcement, and low levels of economic
activities, and an increase in deforestation,” says André Guimarães, the
executive director of Brazil’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
“That is striking us right now. We are still trying to understand what is
going on.”

Brazil
recently pledged to achieve “zero illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030,”
but that would still mean major deforestation between now and then. “What
they are saying is really incredible, that Brazil will coexist with
illegalities in the forest sector by an additional 15 years,” says Paulo
Adario, the Manaus-based senior forest strategist for Greenpeace.

And the
problem of tropical deforestation is far broader than Brazil. The burning
of Indonesia’s tropical peatlands contributed more greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere than the vast majority of countries did from fossil fuels in
2015. And while Indonesia and Brazil remain the world’s tropical forest
loss leaders, other smaller nations like Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and
Madagascar are contributing more and more to the overall total, according to recent
satellite data from the University of Maryland and Google. Other countries into
which the Amazon rainforest extends, like Bolivia, Peru, and Venezuela,
have also seen substantial deforestation in recent years.

Amazon rainforest seen at dawn on Dec. 29, 2015. (Photo
by Harvey Locke)

The
dreaded feedback

A view above the Amazon forest canopy from a research tower on a wet
December morning,
meanwhile, underscores another disturbing problem closely tied to
deforestation. Namely, even as the world tries to protect tropical
forests, climate change itself could alter them further, causing them to
store less carbon and triggering a feedback cycle of ever worsening
warming as a result.

As the sun
rises after an intense rain, the trees of the Amazon – a splash of
different shades of green – seem to collectively perspire. Vast clouds of
water vapor rise off them, a phenomena Lovejoy says is driven both by
countless leaves opening and closing their stomata (or pores) and letting
water out, and also evaporation off of the forest.

In this way
the forest creates weather that fills the planet’s largest river with water and
also provides crucial rain across much of South America.

The Amazon
pulls in Atlantic moisture and then “it gets recycled about five times
as the air mass moves to the Andes,” Lovejoy said. But now, he fears, the
loss of forests is threatening this hydrological cycle – leaving too few
trees to drive rains, a development underscored by droughts in 2005 and
2010.

Deforestation
could dry out the Amazon, but a warmer climate might do the same.
The length of the dry season here is expected to increase due to climate
change, and in fact, that already seems to be happening in some Amazon
regions. And this, in turn, could not only threaten regional hydrology but
push a transition to less carbon-dense forests – in some cases even
exacerbating the possibility of wildfires that could transform tropical forests
into a different, savannah-like environment.

Thus, both
continuing deforestation and a warming climate alike threaten the
carbon storage, and the rain generation, of the vast Amazon system. It’s
not one menace – it’s two that are closely intertwined.

Forests
become part of the climate story

The forests section of the recent Paris climate agreement wasn’t one of the
most noted or debated sections. And it wasn’t as strong as some would have
liked. But the mere fact that it was there was a landmark, Lovejoy said.

“Happily,
forests are now part of the way the whole climate agenda is put together,”
he said, even though “it may have been only a couple of paragraphs in
Paris.”

The key change
in tone may simply reflect the huge ambition of the Paris agreement –
and its citation of the seemingly unattainable 1.5 degree temperature
target in particular. With goals like these, it’s becoming clear that the
solution to climate change isn’t any one thing. It’s an all-hands-on-deck
moment.

The harpy
eagle, glimpsed on two successive mornings in its giant tree, with its regal
crest and powerful legs that Whitney says are “as thick as a man’s wrist,”
is no party to any of this. It’s just trying to survive, and pursuing a
strategy for doing so that evolved long before modern deforestation. It
can’t help needing very large trees and vast areas over which to hunt – so
it can’t help being a kind of symbol.

But what’s
increasingly clear is that the birds, the forests and all of its other life,
the rainfall, the carbon – they all come as a package.

And what’s
equally clear is that climate change isn’t just about temperature, or about
fossil fuels. It’s about all the ways that humans keep pushing gigantic systems
like the Amazon, and hoping that they’ll bounce back, just because they
always have before.

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1 comment:

It's all about the MONEY. There exists NO financial incentive to preserve forests. Sadly, the financial incentive is to sell the trees for lumber, then use the land for agriculture, primarily grazing. The focus is on short-term and the long-term be damned. It's just this simple. If TPTB were truly interested in halting the destruction of forests worldwide and the resulting mass extinction crises, than concrete action would be taken other than "studying the problem". I am convinced that TPTB know we are headed toward ecological suicide. The idea is business as usual for as long as possible. Once the shit hits the fan, the ultra-elite will take refugee in the secure underground facilities being excavated in the Ozarks, for example. Then once the masses have butchered each other and in the process rendered the Earth uninhabitable, the plan is to leave the Earth for some unknown destination. These people know exactly what is happening, yet they do nothing to address the crises. There is a reason that explains their inaction.

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